
What is known of Arctic kelps?
Known
- Little is known of kelp in the Arctic

Past
- Trading in Alaria along Baffin Island coast

Present
- There should be other Laminariales sp.

ArcticKelp project
- There must be kelp in the Arctic
- We don’t know what the drivers of their distributions are
- The Arctic is changing quickly so we should figure this out ASAP
- Where are kelp in the Arctic and what drives their distribution?
Campaigns

Sites

Mean cover

Environmental conditions
Abiotic data
- NAPA (3-Oceans) model
- Model outputs supplied by the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO)

- Based on the NEMO community ocean model

- Daily surface resolution; 1998 to 2015
- Five day (pentad) resolution at 75 depth layers
- Tri-polar grid
- 10 to 20 km resolution

Biotic data
- Bio-ORACLE
- Collection of many different datasets
- Most variables constrained to a 25km resolution Tyberghein et al. (2012)
Assis et al. (2018)
Modelling distribution
- A random forest model was used
- Which variables are important?
- What is the accuracy of the model?
- What is the range in accuracy?
- What is the distribution of inaccuracy?
Variables
|
Data layer
|
Units
|
Count
|
|
Phosphate concentration (mean at min depth)
|
mol/m
|
1000
|
|
Ice concentration for categories
|
%
|
1000
|
|
Ice fraction
|
1
|
1000
|
|
Sea ice thickness (mean)
|
m
|
1000
|
|
Dissolved oxygen concentration (mean at min depth)
|
mol/m
|
1000
|
|
Sea water temperature (mean at min depth)
|
degrees Celcius
|
1000
|
|
divergence
|
1e-8s-1
|
998
|
|
Depth
|
m
|
995
|
|
Sea ice thickness (range)
|
m
|
992
|
|
wind stress module
|
N/m2
|
988
|
Confidence
Total cover

Laminariales

Agarum

Alaria

Results
KFB: Show general kelp cover KFB: Drop Alaria if necessary
- Note that the colour scales are not the same between figures
Total cover

Laminariales

Agarum

Alaria

Acknowledgements
Dr. Youyu Lu and Dr. Xianmin Hu for NAPA model access
This research was undertaken thanks in part to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, through the Ocean Frontier Institute. 
References
Assis, J., Tyberghein, L., Bosch, S., Verbruggen, H., Serrão, E. A., and De Clerck, O. (2018). Bio-oracle v2. 0: Extending marine data layers for bioclimatic modelling. Global Ecology and Biogeography 27, 277–284.
Tyberghein, L., Verbruggen, H., Pauly, K., Troupin, C., Mineur, F., and De Clerck, O. (2012). Bio-oracle: A global environmental dataset for marine species distribution modelling. Global ecology and biogeography 21, 272–281.